Improving the Reuse of Services in Geospatial Applications with XMDD Technology

Abstract

In recent years, the geospatial application domain has embraced component-based development and service orientation to support software reuse. However, due to the specific characteristics of geospatial applications, caused by complex and comprehensive analysis processes and heterogeneous data, the reuse of services faces particular barriers in this domain. Providing application experts without a strong programming or technical background with simple means to reuse these services is an important challenge. This paper describes how we followed the eXtreme Model-Driven Development (XMDD) paradigm to improve the reuse of geospatial services, namely by (1) performing rigorous service abstraction of geospatial tools to be reused in large scale applications, (2) using the java electronic tools integration (jETI) technology for enabling the remote execution and integration of services, and (3) supporting service composition at the user level by using the java application building center (jABC) process modeling framework. Concretely, we discuss how we improved the reuse of services for the assessment of the impacts of sea-level rise.